Identifiability and definiteness in Chinese

Definiteness and Indefiniteness *

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs) determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categ...

Definiteness and implicatures in Tagalog∗

The use of an indefinite NP often implies that the NP’s descriptive content is instantiated by more than one individual. But do indefinites conventionally signal this notion of nonuniqueness or does nonuniqueness arise pragmatically, via reasoning about scalar alternatives? In this paper I argue that in Tagalog, indefinite bare NP patients are only able to implicate nonuniqueness if there is a ...

Exclusivity, uniqueness, and definiteness

An utterance of (2a) means of course that there is only one author of Waverley – indeed, that is most likely one’s point when one uses (2a). But (2b) can mean that there is strictly more than one author of Waverley, on the reading that can be paraphrased, ‘It’s not the case that only Scott is an author of Waverley’. In (2c) the question may concern the number of authors; if the answer is no, th...

Double definiteness in Scandinavian

Definiteness and Eventive Nominals

This paper discusses the interpretation of complex noun phrases. More specifically, it investigates the type of object that a noun phrase 1 denotes. It has been recognized for some time that noun phrases must be able to denote individuals in some circumstances, events in other cases, propositions in still others (Zucchi 1993, Peterson 1997). I will show that, on the one hand, there are various ...